@gbryant I'm completely broke right now, but I can bring awareness.

If it comes down to it- I know it's not ideal, but deleting old videos could give you the option to upload the deleted content to archive.org (rather than directing PT subscribers back to YouTube). Include a link in all videos to Archive indicating "classic videos" can be found there? That would allow you to continue your instance for new content and keep the old content archived. I know it's not ideal but I think that's what I'd do in your position (in absence of funding).

Can't contribute much, but I could give a penny or two if you added some crypto donations option (I live in a very sanctioned place and cannot pay by normal means). I believe this could yield some extra donations from others, too!

Also, in the subtitles, there in an incorrect link to your site at 2:32 - just a heads up so that viewers with subtitles could get to the right place!

Finally, an idea to explore - is S3 hosting the cheapest solution? While it's convenient to some extent, with the traffic you face and generally low stakes with this being a grassroots project, maybe throwing some old drives in two mirrored boxes would serve you better? I'm no expert, but $250/mo for hosting something like a hundred vids sounds insane to me. I know it's cool to have everything enterprise-grade, especially when you're a somewhat big YouTuber, but this could be a fun pet project, and it's not that we the PeerTubers aren't accustomed to some rough edges. You can make a trove of content out of it, too!

In any case, I wish you the best of luck!

@gbryant
I mostly don't watch your videos here, because they are loading very poorly even at 360p.
I'm only watching short clips at peertube on my phone.
For everything else I'm using my htpc.
Therefore I have YT Premium.
As far I know there is no Linux peer tube app that can be controlled by a harmony remote properly.

You could just keep the last X no of vids on here and dump the old videos onto Archive.org or something. Do many people even watch older videos on this platform anyway? Even if they do I can see a case for just having a recent cache of your stuff here and delete the older stuff. It's still easy to find the older stuff elsewhere if needed.

Best of luck with the fundraising if not.

$250 per month sounds a bit excessive? My PeerTube instance hosts 100 videos including many feature films and it's only a fraction of that cost? I'm on managed hosting with Cloud68, maybe you could transfer over to them or a similar hosting service?

I think you're overpaying for hosting. I know of an instance that costs "over $200" to run (https://pony.tube/about/instance), but they have over 10k videos. @MakerTube talks about €0.025/GB/month. I think AWS stuff tends to be more expensive in general. But I don't know the requirements and configurations for peertube. Maybe ask around for other people who host it? @lety what do you think?

Your presence on Peertube is what made me want to support on Patreon since 1-2 years. 720p is perfectly fine by me and I can’t really give more than 2$ a month for now. I don’t think you should keep news videos forever, but maybe don’t delete tutorials or reviews from your channel.

Other option - uploads your videos on other instance)

You can use a raspberry pi to host the instance from your home lab. If you don’t want to expose your global IP directly, you can rent a cheap VPS to act as a buffer between your home network and the outside world. I do this using WireGuard to establish a tunnel between the VPS and my home network and then re-routing incoming connections to services hosted at home. This works even if your home’s IP is dynamic, or if your ISP does not allow Port forwarding. Furthermore, you can isolate the raspberry pi from the rest of your local network if that’s a concern.